Friends who Challenge Me!

A few weeks ago I went down to Mexico City to visit our brand new partnership. I met my friend Craig several years ago at a conference in Beverly Hills. I remember being kind of upset that I got stuck in the distance ministry group (it didn’t sound quiet as glamorous as the groups that were reaching the cities). We sat down at the table and this guy from Nebraska started to share. I have to confess, I didn’t even know where Nebraska was – the only images I had of Nebraska were very large football players (I watched them beat my beloved Vols in the Orange Bowl) and corn. I almost started to tune out this guy from Nebraska, until I realized that he was seeing some incredible things happen up in that corn state. From then on out, I became his groupie. I would email him asking him for advice on things and follow him around at conferences. Eventually we started to become friends. When our partnership became Mexico City, I became facebook friends with Joe Cross – the other city director. He seemed to be pretty young to be leading such a large scope and in my opinion he was too much of a fan of the word “awesome”.

On Fat Tuesday, we loaded up on a plane and headed to Mexico City. That night our team had dinner with Joe and Craig, I immediately knew I was with men who would challenge my thinking and my faith. That week ended up being an incredible week of talking about challenges, dreaming about what could be and just laughing a whole lot.

After I returned from Mexico, I realized that there are two things I really admire about both of those guys. The first thing is their faith that moves them to action. There are over 700 college campuses in Mexico City and well over a million college students, but I am convinced that Joe and Craig really believe that God can reach that city. It’s evident in the way they live, in the way they show up on campus, in the way they coach the stint team and in the way they look for creative solutions to the challenges of the city. They kept saying, “I really believe in divine appointments" or "I really believe that God is going to show up today”. It was exciting to be around such men of faith and it challenged me to take a deep look at my own life. What do I believe God for? Am I simply satisfied with the amazing things he’s done in New Orleans (and they have been amazing) or do I constantly believe him for more? Do I go on campus expecting God to show up and create divine appointments or do I just go about my day, doing the things I need to do? Am I just sitting around solving organizational problems, or am I engaged in the mission of reaching every student? Even though I love new things and new challenges, I think I get stuck in this attitude that says, “well, it’s March, we don’t try to start ministry in March, we just sustain what we have.” I have a feeling that Craig and Joe will be walking on campus believing God to do something until the day they leave Mexico City.

The second thing that I admire about these guys is that their lives seem to be defined by what they give, not by what they get. I wasn’t around Joe as much, but from the stories I heard him tell, he is a giver. I was really impressed with Craig. On the last day we were in Mexico City, we went to visit him at his apartment. His neighbors were out in the street talking to him. They invited us into their home. It was obvious that this was a place where Craig was loved. I watched as he engaged with the family, as he cared for the sick grandmother and as he laughed hysterically at their banter. Later in the day we had to drop back by his apartment to pick something up. The neighborhood kids immediately surrounded his car. He didn’t just rush into his place to grab what he needed. He listened, he cared for them and they couldn’t get enough of him. I remember sitting in the car thinking, “he’s making an impact on the lives of these kids”. Again, this challenged me. Who do I make an impact on outside of my “ministry” to college students? I think I look at people based on what they can do for me, how they can be “used” to advance God’s kingdom. Wow, even when I write it down I realize how ugly that seems and how far from the heart of God I’ve strayed.

Last week I was spending some time processing through some of the things that I’m currently dissatisfied with in ministry. I could probably feel this with any ministry I would work with – sometimes it feels like all I do is solve problems and come up with plans (which ironically create more problems). I was asking Craig some questions via email and just throw
ing my thoughts out there – I think I ended one of my emails saying, “I’m just ready to leave it all” or something like that. His immediate response was “Don’t leave….let’s go reach the world”. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. There’s something in the way he lives and ministers that really makes me think we can really do it, we can really reach the world. I want to live more like that. I want my job to not just be about ministry, but life to be about giving because God has given me so much to give. He gave me his son and he put his spirit within me to live his life through me. How can I give him any less than all of me?

I’m thankful for the people who God puts into my life to challenge me. (Even the ones from the corn state and the ones who really like the word awesome). These men are only two in a long list of people that God has used to sharpen me. If I were only around people like me, I know I would be satisfied with a small, self-centered life. My friends challenge me to embrace all God has for me.

Last night I had a really incredible experience. We had a student leader's crawfish boil - the crawfish part was not the incredible experience, personally I thought that was a little creepy but all of my Louisiana friends seem to think it's the thing to do! After all of the little critters were consumed, we spent some time talking about the fall semester and then in prayer. My friend Truman led the prayer time. Truman has really been learning a lot about listening to God in prayer, so he led us through a time where we listened. I have to admit, I felt uncomfortable. It wasn't the awkward pauses or the occasional sniffle that made me feel uncomfortable, it was my own fear - I really want to hear God in prayer, but what if he doesn't show up? What if I can't hear his voice or he doesn't have anything to say to me? All of those thoughts were swirling around in my head every time I paused to listen. I did feel like the Lord was saying a few things to me - one thing in particular when Truman asked us to ask God to bring to mind a friend and then to pray for them. I was really convicted of a relationship in my life that is not as it should be right now....but I kept thinking, is this just from me or is it from the Lord? I went back and forth, asking that question until we had our sharing time....

One of our students, Willy, shared that the person God put on his heart was his brother....with deep emotion he told that he's scarred to share with his brother, scarred of the rejection he may face. It was very touching. As soon as he finished sharing another girl excitedly burst out, "the person that God on my heart was Willy! I didn't know why but now it makes sense!". So we started to pray for Willy and his brother. This gal opened us in prayer. One of the things she prayed was, "Lord, open the eyes of his heart". Well then Truman prayed and he revealed that in his time of listening God had impressed him with the song "Open the eyes of my heart". It was an amazing experience! God was doing something in our group to show Willy that he was taking care of him, loving his brother more than any of us ever could. It was a divine moment.

I immediately left went home to contact the friend who I needed to make things right with - delayed obedience is disobedience - that was Truman's closing line.

I've been thinking about last night all day....about how God is orchestrating all of our lives. About how he connects us in a community - he does things that causes us to be in each other's lives - our prayers were intertwined last night not because of what we were saying, but because of what we were hearing from the Lord. I need to be a better listener, it's my pride, my fear, my business and my selfishness that keep me from listening. It's my lack of willingness to radically obey, to step out in faith even when things don't make sense. My great desire is that I really would make space in my life for the divine. That really would invite him into every moment of every day believing that he will show up, that he has something greater for me than the life I try to so desperately to control.

In the 8 years that I've worked for this organization, I've never had a time of prayer where we listened to God. Don't get me wrong, I know that the men and women in our organization love God and really seek him. Lately it feels like all we do is try to solve problems and we're not succeeding. The time of prayer made me begin to wonder, "do we just start at the wrong place?" We are a competent group of people, we can "do" ministry - we have great stradegies, but are these stradegies going to be enough? I don't think so. I wonder what would happen if we paused to listen to God - to really find out where he is leading us. I have to first look to my own ministry in this. I spend a lot of time telling God what I would like to see happen - giving him my definition of success. I wonder if he has something greater for me and I miss it because I'm not listening. To see how clearly he was at work in 40 minutes in our time of listening to him, makes me wonder what my ministry would look like day to day if I took that time. I really believe I might start to see those things that only God can do happen here in New Orleans. I want that! I want all that God has for us as a ministry.

I just got home from saying goodbye to one of our relief interns. He is in the reserves and his unit was called up to Iraq. We stuffed ourselves with great Chinese food and a suprisingly good cake decorated with a flag from Winn-Dixie. It was a time to honor and pray for Mike. I've really enjoyed having Mike in New Orleans, there are neat things I see in his life, in his response to going to war and in his character that I admire. He's a great guy but I didn't have any deep, bonding moments with Mike this past year. Yet still as I sat on the floor in the living room of the house and prayed for him, I couldn't help but weep. Here's another young man whose life will be touched by the ugliness of war. I said my goodbye and walked out the door of their house thinking "this is not the way life should be". As I turned the corner, I saw the paint on the house - a visual reminder of the water line that was at least 6 feet high after Katrina. I looked around a neighborhood that was obviously struggling - with piles of trash in the street and kids who were dealing drugs huddled on their porches. I started thinking about a conversation that our team had earlier that day. Chip, from our national team, was talking about the Kingdom of God. Jesus said, "the Kingdom of God is at hand". He ushered in the Kingdom, but we still don't live in the fulness of the Kingdom - that will only happen someday when Christ comes again. To think that the Kingdom of God is now and is also not yet is such a difficult tension.

Earlier today I was on the Riverwalk. I was listening to my ipod and looking out over the Mississippi as the sun was shining, the wind was gently blowing and the trees were blooming all around me. I remember thinking, "this is such a beautiful world - it's so easy to see God alive and active in this world. It's so easy to know he loves me and loves this city at this moment". How can I feel such hope at 9 in the morning and then just 12 hours later experience such despair - such a sense of the world being so broken....so empty and so seemingly without God.

So today, I am struggling with what it means to live in the Kingdom. To live in the 'now but not yet' of being a follower of Christ. What will it mean for Mike to experience the Kingdom of God in Iraq but also experience the horror of war? What will it mean for me to experience the Kingdom of God in this city that I have grown to love but to not ignore it's ugliness and brokenness? An even bigger question for me is probably, what will it mean for me to actively be a part of bringing the Kingdom of God to the world around me? Not in ways that are neat or ways that I can control, but in ways that I know the presence of God has indeed shown up?

Four Years Later

The war in Iraq has been going on for four years today. The other day when I was cleaning up my house, I found a picture that I’ve kept in my bible for the last year. It’s a picture of my little brother the day he left for war. He’s standing in his backyard in his uniform…he looks very serious and soldierly. He also still looks a lot like that kid I grew up with. He was gone for almost exactly one year. He joined the army because he loves our country, loves the honor of serving the country and the hands-on experience that the military offers. He enlisted post September 11th, when the world for us went from being mostly a safe place to a place of threats of terror, long lines at the airport and color-coded security levels. (I still have no idea what those colors mean).

The US went to war with Iraq several months after he enlisted, so we knew the day would come when he would go to war. From November of 2005 to November of 2006, the war was no longer a distant battle that didn’t really effect my day to day life. Every report of a soldier dying or being hurt left a question in my mind…”is it him?” I often wondered if it would be my brother who would come home in a coffin, with an American flag proudly draped over it to show the sacrifice he had made. I wept for the families who did lose loved ones. It was no longer a news story, it touched my life. In May of 2006, a man under Dave’s command died from a roadside bomb. He still wears a black band around his wrist as a sign of rememberence. That was his first friend that he watched die. In October, 2 men died in a armored car while talking on the radio with him. Just a few weeks before they came home, he lost his first sergeant (and roommate) and his driver to another deadly roadside bomb. The war changed him. It’s subtle…not the crazy, ranting guy like the ones often portrayed in movies from the Vietnam War era, but it changed him from that boy to a man. (He wasn’t really a “boy” when he left, he was 25 – I remember my sister-in-law commenting on how so many of the guys who said goodbye that day looked like babies, they were 18 and 19 year-olds – headed to war). There is a hardness in him, a part of him that I think was lost on the battlefields of Iraq.

He’s always been my little brother (he’s 5 years younger) and I’ve always wanted to protect him from the pain of life. The pain he must face now is something I cannot understand and cannot fix. It is a part of who he is; it will shape the rest of his life. Everything in me desperately wants to wipe away the past year, to bring back his friends, to take him back to a place where life still really is going to work out. The truth is, our pain is often the thing that shapes us the most. In my life that has been true. In the greatest moments of pain, my great need for God has been revealed. In my deepest disappointments, I’ve realized that the world really is not the way it should be, that I can’t make life work and that I desperately need a Savior to enter into my pain. It’s been the pain that’s brought me the closest to really knowing my God. The truth is, I draw nearer to him in the times of pain than I do in the times of goodness. So the question becomes, “why do I work so hard to shield those I love from the pain?” Do I not believe that God will meet them there? Then I have to ask myself, “why do I work so hard to shelter myself from the pain?” Do I not believe that God will meet me there again? That he has a purpose in my life that is greater than the pain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that we go around looking for the bad in the world or making stupid decisions that will put us in painful situations, but I do believe that I sometimes want to protect myself so much that I don’t take risks. I don’t let people into my heart because I’m not sure I can handle being hurt again. I don’t reach out because I fear that I’ll be rejected. I don’t move toward people because it can be messy. Living by faith means that I have to believe God is in every situation – in every bloody battle and every happy day. Living by faith means growing up, entering the fight and believing God to meet me there no matter what the outcome is!

Making Room for the Divine....

At its very heart, Christianity is therefore a messianic movement and it seeks to consistently embody the life, spirituality, and mission of its Founder. We have made it so many other things, but this is its utter simplicity. Discipleship, becoming like Jesus our Lord and Founder, lies at the epicenter of the church’s task. It means that Christology must define all that we do and say. It also means that in order to recover the ethos of authentic Christianity, we need to refocus our attention back to the Root of all it all, to recalibrate our work and our organizations around the person and work of Jesus our Lord. This will mean taking the Gospels seriously as the primary texts that define us. It will mean acting like Jesus in relation to people outside the faith…

This chapter in “The Forgotten Ways” by Alan Hirsch has really challenged me. What would my life look like if Jesus were really Lord of all of it…if I didn’t have a compartment that was “spiritual” and a compartment that was “the rest of life”…if there was no line between the sacred and the secular? To the ancient people, the people who God chose to reveal himself to, there was no separation. But here, living in America in 2007, I have a hard time imaging what it would look like for life to not be segmented. I am so used to the part of my life that’s really mine and the part of my life that belongs to God. Now of course I would say, Jesus is Lord of my life. I don’t just think about him on Sunday morning or from 9-5 during my missionary work day….but does my life reflect Jesus is Lord when I’m on hold with a certain company that keeps messing up my internet service for 30 minutes? Does my life reflect Jesus is Lord when my sweet neighbor wants to chat but that’s cutting into my workout time? Does my life reflect Jesus is Lord when I turn on the TV night after night to be entertained? Does my life reflect that Jesus is Lord at the grocery store, in the car; in the way I love people? There are times during the day that I really seek to embody the life, spirituality and mission of the Founder of my faith, but most of the day I consider mine, I plan my tasks, I do what I need to do, and I occasionally throw up a prayer for Jesus to show up or to open my eyes to what is really happening. How much do I miss because my life is centered around me and not on him?

Last week my friend Dawn and I went out to eat. Dawn loves to talk to people whereas I’m usually not a chatty person with people I don’t know. While we were ordering, Dawn started to strike up a conversation with our waitress. Again, I usually just order and go on with things…but Dawn asked her what her name was, asked her opinion on different menu items and was overall just friendly to her. When our food arrived, Dawn asked Mercedes (our waitress) if there was anything we could pray for her. Mercedes looked very surprised (I can imagine that doesn’t happen often in New Orleans) and said, “You can pray for my Road Home money and my rebuilding”. (The Road Home is the city of New Orleans very SLOW recovery effort). She then started to tell us that just she and her husband had been working on their home for months and were ready to gut it. Well, with Campus Crusade we just happen to have hundreds of college students descending on the city of New Orleans in the month of March to gut homes and serve the community. I immediately asked Mercedes if she needed help. She gave me her phone number and was so thankful! The next day, a team of 20 students worked into the evening to gut Mercedes home. God had a divine appointment planed for us during that dinner! Later I started to wonder, would I have missed that opportunity if Dawn weren’t there? Going out to dinner for me is about my time to catch up with a friend, to maybe encourage that person and hopefully leave feeling a deep connection and fulfillment in my life. I rarely think about the person serving me unless they do a bad job – then I grumble. But if my mission really is to represent my Lord in every part of my life, the sacred and the secular, then the way I sit at a restaurant should be different…not only that, but I should expect divine appointments to happen every day. All weekend I’ve been thinking, God must want to use my life in so many more ways, but they are outside of my compartments, so I miss it.

Finally, today this has led me to really start to consider the culture of my organization. We are a feedback rich environment, which I like. The feedback that I’ve been given in my life has opened my eyes to some blind spots and it has helped me grow as a person and as a leader. On the other hand, our feedback tends to be very “us” focused. It’s about how we are doing as leaders, it’s about how we are doing in developing a team, it’s about how we can balance all the roles and best use the strategies within our ministry. None of these things are things that I think are bad within themselves, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that they are feeding into this idea that life is about our roles rather than about our faith. I talk to friends who work with me all the time who say “I’m just trying to make my life more normal”…I wonder, is life normal for some one who is fully devoted to following Christ? It doesn’t seem like it should be. Normal life for those around us is focused on what makes me happy, what brings me comfort, security and stability. But when I read the Bible, Jesus is challenging us to live a life that offers none of those things. It means being unconvinced to love some one who bugs me. It means moving toward people even when I’m tired, or when I “need” some alone time. It means forgiving those who hurt me even if they never change. It means that my rights are gone and life isn’t about me. So, I recognize that my deepest problem is my own lack of faith, my own compartmentalization of the gospel, but I also see another problem…the culture of the organization that I work with that seems to promote life being about my development and using the best strategy to get the job done. I love this organization – it’s the vehicle God used to change my life. I’m just beginning to wonder if we’re playing too safe, trying to have too much of a normal life, a life that Christ never called his followers to live.

Hanging Back

For maybe the tenth time, I’m trying to make it through a year with my one-year Bible (well, not really a year because I just started in March….I figured I’ve made it through January and February enough times that I could just skip them this year). A few days ago I read the story of the Israelites standing at the edge of the promised land for the second time (the first time they stood in this very place, their fear cost them 40 years in the wilderness and the death of a generation). What really surprised me as I read this story was that the Ruebenites and Gadites asked for the land “east” of the Jordan rather than crossing and living in the land to the west. They promised to go to the land and fight if they could first build cities to leave behind their wives, children and livestock. Stay on the east of the Jordan? After 40 years of wandering in the wilderness to cross this river into the promised land?! At first this appalled me! Granted, the land to the east of the Jordan sounds pretty good – it’s lush, good for crops, beautiful – all in all, it’s a good place to settle……but there’s something better out there, something yet to be seen – the promised land, the very land that God sent Abraham to and promised to give this nation. Why on earth would they stay on the east of the Jordan.

As I drinking my coffee and contemplating this very thought, I started to realize how much I like to settle “east” of the Jordan in my own life. I really believe that God created me for a great adventure….that he has a life for me that is far beyond what I can ever dream of, and far beyond what I can in my own power live or experience…..but the truth is, I like my comfortable world – the world that I can understand, that I can build my city on, that I might be able to venture out of into the battle but without the risk. I can come back home – I can come back to the known, I don’t have to risk losing everything by packing it all up and crossing the Jordan. Ouch! I hate that I live the safe life. I wonder what keeps me here. Is it my fear that God really won’t take care of me if I step out? Is it my control issues – at least if I percieve I'm in control, I can manage my life and dabble in faith? What would it look like if I packed it all up and crossed the Jordan? If I chose to live my life in a way that showed that there was no back up plan, no safety net – only the Lord, how would my life look different? I don’t think I would be as selfish – as worried about my comfort or my happiness. I think my ministry would be characterized more by radical steps of faith rather than doing the things that seem to “work”. I think my relationships would be deeper, more real because I wouldn’t be so worried about how I’m perceived or who loves me. I don’t think my life would be so much about me and my needs.

That’s the life I long for, that I’d love to live….but I’m not sure how. So I find myself, standing on the edge of this Jordan – I feel like I’m gazing into the promised land, but I’m not quite sure how to get there. It seems easier to build my little city here and occasionally run into battle than move in and live in the unknown….but everything in me longs for this adventure……